Poster of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer
Look at the poster for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and your very first thought might be that it is anything but subtle, or obscure. But hold on. Let me explain.
Let me start off by saying that I have not watched Oppenheimer. So this is not a movie review. Instead this is me taking the opportunity to use the film to explore two things: i) nuclear armament and (ii) what we can observe about Christopher Nolan's psyche as reflected through his work/s.
I believe that every single person who has found their medium of expression ends up exploring some key themes through their work. It's their own nagging questions which they try to work out through the scope of their work and art. One of Christopher Nolan's questions seems to be about how the unconscious influences the conscious. A few instances from his works might explain what I am trying to convey.
Memento is about how our drive to action is connected to our capacity to remember. Memory is seen as an integral part of consciousness, an essential tool to connecting to self-drive. Lose your memory and you lose what drives you.
Still from Christopher Nolan's "Memento," image taken from IMDB
Inception is a more literal play on Nolan's own desire to understand the unconscious. We are taken into worlds made within dreams and we can look at it as a broad exploration of how the conscious tries to become aware of the unconscious. Nolan seems fixated on control so the protagonists of his movies are always trying to be in control of the unconscious. Whether they succeed or not is not really the focal question there, as that popularly-debated ending scene of Inception illustrates.
Still from Christopher Nolan's "Inception," image taken from Randomwire
Then in Prestige we see him explore the idea of unconscious influences through the characters of two competing magicians. That we, the audience of the movie, as well as audiences at magic shows, believe the magicians or illusionists who pull off tricks on us is something that Nolan uses to drive home the subtle point of desiring to stay unconscious. As one of the characters in the movie says,
"The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret but you won't find it because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know."
Still from Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige," image taken from IMDB
The theme of becoming conscious of what one was previously only dimly aware of is something of a running thread in almost all the movies of Nolan I have seen. Apart from the ones mentioned above, Interstellar and Tenet also come to mind. Tie that with another recurrent theme in his work, the struggle between "good" and "evil" within a human being and I think we would be at a good starting point to discuss nuclear disarmament vis-a-vis Nolan's Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer may very well be the father of the atom bomb, but one of the opportunities that Nolan's film has presented us with is to go beyond the father and engage with a different set of questions:
What is the place of Oppenheimer's creation in this world? And what is our individual response to the fact of that creation and our subsequent collective responsibility?
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Today is 10th August, 2023.
Almost eighty years ago, on 6th and 9th August, 1945, USA during its war against
Japan, detonated two nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings decimated both the cities, killing millions of innocent civilians and leaving survivors with cancer and other chronic diseases through their lifetime. From the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a short excerpt of what the bombings were like:
"The uranium bomb detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 had an explosive yield equal to 15,000 tonnes of TNT. It razed and burnt around 70 per cent of all buildings and caused an estimated 140,000 deaths by the end of 1945, along with increased rates of cancer and chronic disease among the survivors.
A slightly larger plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki three days later levelled 6.7 sq km. of the city and killed 74,000 people by the end of 1945. Ground temperatures reached 4,000°C and radioactive rain poured down.That was the first and only time nuclear weapons were used in the world."
Japan in 1945 was the first and only time till now where the nuclear bomb was used in warfare. Since then, what followed was an interesting fork--
On the one hand, Japan's destruction and loss made it apparent how implausible and absolutely destructive it would be to our collective world if nuclear bombing became the norm; on the other, it drove a fear into the hearts of global leaders that to not be armed with nuclear weapons would meant a deathly fate like Japan's.
It is commonly believed that a country that doesn't have its own nuclear arsenal is vulnerable to such attacks. But there is a logical fallacy in such thinking. The bombing that happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was both unexpected and unprecedented. Any similar attack henceforth can be expected but will still be unprecedented. Because even though the detonation of atomic bombs has set a precedent, the scale of it, the state of inter-country relations, the scope of physical, structural, and psychic destruction, will all set a new precedent if it happens again. There can be no preparation for such an event, at least not in the ways that many global leaders believe.
Nuclear armament is not a solution to potential nuclear war; nuclear disarmament is.
If nobody has nuclear weapons, there can be no nuclear war. However, it would be simplistic and naive to believe that a policy change is all that is required for nuclear disarmament, that enough signatures and petitioning will bring about an everlasting nuclear disarmament. And this is where we must lean into cinema again to see what it's showing us by exploring history and possibility both.
Oppenheimer's story, whether you like it as a topic chosen for a movie or not, is one of individual drives getting tied to collective fear and purpose. His very individual desire to explore something was taken up and funded by those who saw a vision for that desire. He became a tool for a destructive vision and the only thing that could have stopped him and his fellow scientists getting co-opted into the grand scheme of things was themselves. The Manattan Project was not just for nuclear arms development but also for collecting data on the German nuclear weapon project.
Joseph Rotblat, a scientist in the Mahattan Project, left it when it became evident to him that Germany was not working on an atomic bomb as it had previously been. Rotblat went on to research nuclear fallout i.e. the impact of a bombing on the upper stratosphere of our planet. His work became the basis for policy changes in nuclear armament and he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament, one of the only voices of reason from the Manhattan Project.
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So, why should you, someone who possibly only likes movies, care about nuclear disarmament? And why should you look at Nolan's movies at all?
Well, nobody will be spared when and if a nuclear war breaks out. Widespread destruction and loss is guaranteed. But even before it, what is fed to us through narratives in movies, everyday conversations, media, are things we have to become mindful of. Narratives become a part of our belief systems, many of them absorbed by us unconsciously. And most of the mainstream narratives are built predominantly upon fear and mistrust. We are taught again and again that the world is a horrible place, humans cannot be trusted, that left to our own devices, we will destroy each other and everything else. You may have personally seen instances of such behaviour and history and media may have bolstered your belief with proof of similar events. But that is only one part of our existence. It is the part that we need to stop identifying with so heavily if we are to evolve into a better society, build better relationships, heal the fractures between us and create a different world, built on a different vision. We need to become individually concerned with our capacity for goodness, and create things from that place of care and concern.
If Oppenheimer and the choices made by the US in 1945 are examples of the terror that humankind is capable of, then Rotblat and the subsequent conversations and work on advocating for nuclear disarmament are examples of the good and sensible that humankind is capable of. And every day, each of us can consciously choose which of those two parts within us we want to act from. If not, we become an undifferentiated being who gets sucked into whatever the collective has decided.
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